New limited-edition titanium watch builds its dial from three spinning sapphire disks

Ming and Massena LAB have put the 57.09 Secret Honey on sale — a 125-piece limited edition priced at CHF 7,250, or roughly $8,700 before tax. Orders open on Ming's own site at 1:00 PM GMT today, and the watch will be shown publicly at WatchTime New York from 16 to 18 October.

Ming is a small independent brand run by the designer and photographer Ming Thein. It has operations in La Chaux-de-Fonds and Kuala Lumpur. The micro watch brand has taken two prizes at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève and is known for unusual engineering, including a production watch weighing 8.8 grams. Massena LAB is run by the collector and former Antiquorum executive William Massena — he commissions designs from independent makers. The two first worked together in 2021 on a pair of honeycomb-dial watches that sold out on release.

The dial is everything with this particular model. Three sapphire disks are stacked over a dark brown lacquered base and rotate once every 24 hours, 12 hours and 60 minutes. Each disk has its own color and its own pattern of cutouts, so the overlapping apertures produce a shifting pattern rather than a fixed one. Hour and minute markings are present on two of the disks in a honey tone and glow orange after dark. The indices and both logos are engraved into the box crystal above and filled with a white-emitting compound.

The grade 5 titanium case measures 40 mm across, 10.17 mm thick and 47.8 mm lug to lug, water resistant to 100 meters. Its triple-stepped lugs use three finishes. The outer step has been left bare, the middle has been coated in titanium nitride to read as yellow gold and the inner step in TiSiN for a rose gold tone. The watch is powered by a Sellita-based automatic running at 4 Hz with about 50 hours of reserve. Leather and rubber straps are both included.